Children comprehend iconic gestures relatively later than deictic gestures. Previous research with English-learning children indicated that they could comprehend iconic gestures at 26 months, a pattern whose extension to other languages is not yet known. The present study examined Turkish-learning children's iconic gesture comprehension and its…

The prevalence of late language emergence (LLE) in young children is high, comprising 10 to 20% of toddlers. Late language emergence refers to children who do not use at least 50 single words and 2-word phrases at the age of two. Current best practices for the under-three population with or at risk of having disabilities include the use of…

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an…

This study examined the effectiveness of the "Thrive by Three" intervention for 1- to 3-year-old's language development. Data from 78 childcare centres, 187 toddler classrooms, and 1561 children (91.4% native Norwegian) were included. Results revealed that children in the intervention group had slightly steeper language development than…

Children with delays in expressive language (late talkers) have heterogeneous developmental trajectories. Some are late bloomers who eventually "catch-up," but others have persisting delays or are later diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD). Early in development it is unclear which children will belong to which group. We…

A majority of children's language learning experiences occur in inclusive early child care and education settings. Few evidence-based professional development (PD) programs exist to empower early childhood education providers to use language instruction practices with children in inclusive classrooms. There is little research on providers'…

Real-time attention coordination in parent-toddler dyads is often studied in tightly controlled laboratory settings. These studies have demonstrated the importance of joint attention in scaffolding the development of attention and the types of dyadic behaviors that support early language learning. Little is known about how often these behaviors…

Infants and toddlers experience the world in interaction with others. Likewise, social interactions are important in learning about math--concepts of number ("one," "two," "three"), space ("on top," "upside-down," "round"), and magnitude ("more," "big,"…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

This research takes a dyadic approach to study early word learning and focuses on toddlers' (N = 20, age: 17-23 months) "information seeking" and parents' "information providing" behaviors and the ways the two are coupled in real-time parent-child interactions. Using head-mounted eye tracking, this study provides the first…

Verbs are often uttered before the events they describe. By 2 years of age, toddlers can learn from such an encounter. Hearing a novel verb in transitive sentences (e.g. "The boy lorped the cat"), even with no visual referent present, they later map it to a causative meaning (e.g. "feed") (e.g. Yuan & Fisher, [Yuan, S.,…

Infants show shifting patterns of visual engagement to faces over the first years of life. To explore the adaptive implications of this engagement, we collected eye-tracking measures on cross-sectional samples of 10-25-month-old typically developing toddlers (TD;N = 28) and those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD;N = 54). Concurrent language…

In typical development, word learning goes from slow and laborious to fast and seemingly effortless. Typically developing 2-year-olds seem to intuit the whole range of things in a category from hearing a single instance named--they have word-learning biases. This is not the case for children with relatively small vocabularies ("late…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

Computers, laptops, digital tablets, and whiteboards are all commonly used technologies in classrooms today. The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increased use of digital technology to offer virtual learning and maintain social connections. Given the multifaceted nature of technology, the complexities of child development, and the increasing…